Archive for October 25th, 2008

Matt Stoller: But that McCain himself ran an honorable campaign [in 2000].

McCain 2000 staffer: Ha! Again, the story is more detailed than that. Rove ran a Rove campaign. So yes, they were dirty. But we were too. I remember the week after NH, we surged in SC polls from something like 10pts behind Bush to 10pts ahead. After a little slipping because Bush was letting surrogates go after McCain’s military history, we went up with an ad that said Bush twisted the truth just like Clinton. The ad aired for one day. The press said McCain was going negative, the Bush people screamed bloody murder, and our campaign went into a tail spin. Had that ad not run, I’m convinced, and if you spoke to people from the SC campaign or Weaver or Davis and they were honest with you they would agree, that ad sank the campaign.

Matt Stoller: What were some of the rumors the campaign was pushing about Bush?

McCain 2000 staffer: I remember talking with reporters after events about Bush’s DUI. I remember senior press staff doing that. I remember them talking about Laura Bush’s horrible car accident, saying that she may have been drunk when it happened. On a funny side note, during a debate Bush held up this flyer we were handing out door to door and at events that said Bush would hurt seniors… it was a really nasty flyer aimed at scaring the elderly. So Bush holds it up and asks McCain about it. McCain looks at Bush and says it isn’t from his campaign. Bush points out that it says McCain’s campaign paid for it. McCain then says well we have stopped doing that. Keep in mind, McCain swore off negative TV ads after the Clinton one failed so badly. So I’m watching the debate and I’m like… is he crazy? We have people in the field handing that out TONIGHT. He blew up at the staff that night over the flyer. Vintage McCain. He doesn’t mind getting deep in the mud when it works for him. But if he gets caught? Hell-to-pay. And then he plays the straight-talking martyr…..

To see the filth he’s been approving [in 2008] is pretty sick, but not unexpected.

One of the reasons I love reading Avedon’s Sideshow is that even when I am not all that thrilled by a link, it always seems to lead to something remarkable. Thus it was that clicking on a link about joy (nice, soothing images), I discovered this link of Celtic music and images, this one dueling Celtic violins (dancing in astronaut-high heels while playing green fiddles–yikes!), and an irresistibly sweet rendition of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

The presence of beautiful Irish women in the films, either as portrayals or as performers, does not harm the enjoyment.

Like this:

One story that we’ve tried to cover is that torture of captives is not an aberration that magically appeared in 2001. It is common in the American justice system. There is a direct line from the American prison system to the torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib:

[Psychiatrist Terry Kupers said that] “The plight of prisoners in the USA is strikingly similar to the plight of the Iraqis who were abused by American GIs. Prisoners are maced, raped, beaten, starved, left naked in freezing cold cells and otherwise abused in too many American prisons, as substantiated by findings in many courts that prisoners’ constitutional rights to remain free of cruel and unusual punishment are being violated.”

Torture techniques used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo are all too familiar in prisons in the U.S. as well. Hooded, robed figures with electrical wiring attached to them have been seen at the city jail in Sacramento, California. Prisoners in Maricopa County jails in Phoenix, Arizona have been forced to wear women’s underwear. And guards in the Utah prison system have piled naked bodies in grotesque and uncomfortable positions.

And there are heroes who have stood up to expose our rotten prisons. Perhaps none is as persistent and as modest as John Conroy of the Chicago Reader, whose 19-year long dedication to exposing police torture in Chicago is described here by Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times (via Romenesko):

As a reporter for the Chicago Reader, John Conroy wrote more than 100,000 words about the police torture scandal between the time he started looking into it in 1989 and when he was laid off last December because of budget cuts.

Although he would tell you he’s only a “bit player,” Conroy was probably as responsible as anyone for keeping the police torture issue in Chicago’s consciousness during that time. He wrote about it and wrote about it, to the point that it probably wasn’t good for his career, because nobody likes a Johnny-one-note.

His editor suggested he move on to the next subject, and he tried. After all, he told himself, he wasn’t having much impact. But he kept coming back.

“It seemed be a matter of life and death,” he explained. “There were guys on Death Row that were going to die.”

I don’t mean to hold Conroy out as a hero. He wouldn’t like that, and I promised him I wouldn’t. He was just a journalist doing a job.

May the road rise up to meet you, Mr. Conroy. As we try to scrub the stain of Guantanamo off of our nation, your nearly two decades of patient work may help us to find and erase the source, which lies within our own hearts.